patriotism and liberty used to be the answer...now it;s populism and nationalism. History makes huge distinctions between those concepts, and the latter two ain’t good....
We had to do some pretty ugly things to shake off the crown in the 1700's.
Uglier things, still, to destroy Nazism and Imperial Japan.
The key is collecting the rat poison, and not putting out new poison, when you are done destroying the vermin. We've done it a few times in our history.